“A Man Who Believes in God can Never Find God”

“A man who believes in God can never find God. If you are open to reality, there can be no belief in reality. If you are open to the unknown, there can be no belief in it. After all, belief is a form of self-protection, and only a petty mind can believe in God. Look at the belief of the aviators during the war who said God was their companion as they were dropping bombs! So you believe in God when you kill, when you are exploiting people. You worship God and go on ruthlessly extorting money, supporting the army — yet you say you believe in mercy, compassion, kindliness.”

“As long as belief exists, there can never be the unknown; you cannot think about the unknown, thought cannot measure it. The mind is the product of the past, it is the result of yesterday, and can such a mind be open to the unknown? It can only project an image, but that projection is not real; so your god is not God – it is an image of your own making, an image of your own gratification. There can be reality only when the mind understands the total process of itself and comes to an end. When the mind is completely empty – only then is it capable of receiving the unknown. The mind is not purged until it understands the content of relationship — its relationship with property, with people — until it has established the right relationship with everything. Until it understands the whole process of conflict in relationship, the mind cannot be free.”

“Only when the mind is wholly silent, completely inactive, not projecting, when it is not seeking and is utterly still, only then that, which is eternal and timeless, comes into being.”

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7 thoughts on ““A Man Who Believes in God can Never Find God””

Wow. That’s a beautiful expression of something I thus far have been unable to articulate for myself. I have said, at times, as a shorthand way of trying to say it, that I don’t “beleive in belief,” but that doesn’t truly encompass what you have quoted.

It reminds me of a quote I often reference from Robert Anton Wilson, “My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”

It also seems similar to my thoughts about the concept of faith which to me implies a lack of certainty… faith as an act of hope and humility rather then as a way to ‘know’ the truth. Like in the above one could be open to ‘receiving the unknown’ through faith however not when faith is understood as the ‘truth,’ only when it it is expressed in an open way that acknowledges that uncertainty is a prerequisite to faith.

Certianly Yahweh of the Old and New Testament requires that we come to the end of our will in order to fully receive His. However, the quest for the “pure nothingness” of some Eastern philosophers is alien to the true Christian. Only the fear of God can bring one to an awareness of one’s brokenness. I do agree that in a semantic world the term ‘belief’ implies subjective reality as opposed to knowledge which theoretically can be determined externally. The central question raised by the passage you quoted is whether or not humans can ever experience anything beyond the limits of their own existence. Even the achievement of the “wholly silent, completely inactive, not projecting” mind is gained by disciplined practice using verious meditations promoted by Krishnamurti and others.

Knowledge of Yahweh can be experiential, but one must have faith (belief) in order to turn toward that experience. God would have us know Him with our whole being not by shutting down our faculties.

@ Wayne: Thank you for an interesting comment! I recall that Krishnamurti strongly advocated against the use of any technique or practice for meditation — even going so far as to say that any meditation which relied on a technique or practice was not genuine. Thus, so far as I know, he did not promote the sort of meditative practices you seem to feel he did.

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